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Everything posted by Zoraptor
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At least IGN isn't owned by Rupert Murdoch any more. Dunno if Ziff Davis has any skeletons in their closet but it could scarcely be more than Uncle Rupes has. Probably will end up like GameStop buying Impulse, ie irrelevant within months. lol pirates are socialists Pirate Parties are little a anarchists, which is a left libertarian philosophy. The term may have been stolen by ancaps (ie right libertarians), but it's broader than just them.
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You also have to have a very high IQ to understand The Wire. The action is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of urban slang most of the dialogue will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also McNulty's nihilistic outlook and fake Baltimore accent, which is deftly woven into his characterisation - his personal philosophy draws heavily from drunk Irish descendant archetypes, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these characterisations, to realize that they're not just stereotypes- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike The Wire truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the subtlety in Bunk and McNulty's definitive "f***" scene which to the well informed is itself a cryptic reference to the NYPD's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge filing denotation. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Paul Simon's genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools... how I pity them. And yes by the way, I DO have a Jay Landsman tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the Commissioner Rawls eyes only- And even he'd have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Then again I prefer my copypastas with appropriate revisions. I like The Wire but it isn't for everyone by any means. It's dense and inpenetrable, and is very slow moving while things are set up. You just about need subtitles for the urban slang in the beginning, few of the characters even approach being sympathetic or heroic, and the normal tropes of television are largely ignored. It's also unforgivingly complex. That's what makes it good to a large extent, but it also makes it something that requires far more concentration and thought than usual, and any of those things can easily turn people off before they get hooked. Especially so if you just want something to relax to after a hard day at work.
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I don't think the issues themselves are important. Israel will ignore anything from the UN anyway, so long as they can rely on a US veto at the SC, and UNESCO reports are even less important than General Assembly resolutions. For Trump it's a chance to play to two of his bases, anti UN and pro Israel. This week certainly seems to be the week for Trump to try and get some brownie points from his supporters, assuming he doesn't certify Iran to go along with leaving UNESCO and trying an Executive Order approach to do something, anything to obamacare.
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IIRC you're both right. BF1 is there now, mostly for the MP of course. Keeps player numbers up and some of those players will buy extra MP stuff for money. Pretty sure that BF1 was also on Access before release, as part of their hype/ beta program. Definitely a time limited version though, since it was a beta/ test.
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I wouldn't want the EU regulating content though, we'd end up with green blood and the like. But their consumer protection has been pretty good, and loot boxes are a consumer protection issue.
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That's two unconnected issues though- not that I'm surprised given the nature of US foreign policy. Most of the people who would be ecstatic about Hebron being labeled as Palestinian would be equally ecstatic about criticism of Syria; and most of those who hated the Hebron decision would be as well yet the US failed to win the vote they tried over Syria even despite that. Which given the nature of the rebels and their attitude to history and culture was completely appropriate. Wahhabi's hate culture, science and education, it's inherent to their philosophy of man's peak being in the 7th century.
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Crap as it is otherwise I could see the EU getting involved in loot boxes and putting a stop to them. I doubt that steam would have brought in their refund system if it had only been Aus/ NZ demanding it, EU on the other hand is a lot harder to ignore. Yes. Because Denuvo isn't DRM, it's tamper protection, it says so on their site, so it cannot be cracked as it's not DRM. That's logic! It also doesn't effect performance, it says that on their site too; coder gods they are, able to make programs run with no overheads. Any dissent from those views means you're a dirty pirate who pirates dirtily, so your views are invalid dirty pirate who pirates. Dude's otherwise more or less rational, too.
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Not that surprising if they're expecting to make money from the multiplayer stuff. You can guarantee that won't be covered by the EA Access fee. MEA also quite clearly doesn't have the reputation required for 'proper' sales to have a long tail and if you're buying it now it's for the dollar equivalent of only a few months of EA Access anyway.
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.. Unless you are a specialist yourself, you are simply not qualified to make an informed decision on whether additive X is bad for you.. That's the critical thing. If you know much about computers then people who fall for MS Tech Support scams seem like idiots, but they just don't know enough about computers to make informed decisions and on the face of it MS phoning up about your computer issues does make sense, so does your bank telling you to change your password for security reasons. If you go to professional services- builders, electricians, dieticians, or whatever- you're usually going to them because they are experts and you aren't. You cannot be expected to easily tell a fraudulent but convincing con from the genuine article though you should at least be sceptical of deals too good to be true. Of course the first two examples are outright illegal and cannot be regulated, but you can protect against renegade professional services. As to why professional associations may want to take action against cowboys by dobbing them in or whatever, a lot of professional services have terrible reputations due to the rogue elements, and that terrible reputation impacts the good workers who get the safety accreditations and do the proper workmanship and use the right tools. And bad advice and workmanship can be outright dangerous.
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I generally agree, but in her case I found the fight with the nearby generic skeletons and several of the magister groups even excluding Alex to be quite a lot harder- which I suspect wasn't the intention, and doesn't make much sense in context given you'd seen her beat a dozen magisters on the ship. Personally I think I'd have switched her encounter and Radeka the witch's one. The Radeka encounter was clearly meant to be done near the end, so they could accurately estimate what level you'd be at when doing it and make it a challenge, which I think you want for what was at least kind of the early antagonist of the game.
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Considering she sank a ship with a dozen (?) magisters on it she's ridiculously easy to kill, even on tactician. It might have taken me more than 1 round to kill her, but if it did she was stunlocked the whole time. Possibly the easiest fight in Fort Joy except for some of the generic voidwoken ones.
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Redskins would have been a better example as they are an NFL team, and that term is a lot more offensive as compared to Indians.
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That's actually what I disliked about Sword Coast Stratagems as Baldur's Gate mods- with it every encounter was designed as if the mob was there only to fight that encounter. I don't really enjoy gaming the system as a player, it's doubly annoying when the enemy is doing it to you because it makes cheesey tactics mandatory. Which reminds me of the boss fights. They seem to start with a mandatory first turn to the boss, and the boss seems to have above maximum AP as well. If you're forced to start close due to being in a building or via a dialogue they can do an insane amount of damage and there's nothing (well, little) you can do about it. If you've got more space you have more options, but they're scarcely dairy free options. eg with the first boss fight
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It's tradition on a first play through to have Ian armed with a nice shiny automatic SMG though. Especially if you're amused by nerd rage.
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People can have more than one go during a round via Fane's (and I guess potentially others) source power at least. Never noticed it happen otherwise though the system definitely has quirks. Unlike in the first game initiative is pretty useless because no matter how much you have you're going to alternate turns with the enemy, and have trouble applying status effects if you go first anyway due to the new ray and particle shields. Indeed, so much of effective character progression now is gear/ force field based that I could easily imagine a dual lone wolf set up being easier than a full party. My level 13 party still has people wearing occasional level 6 (!) gear as there hasn't been enough replacement stuff for all of them, and it really tells. Thing is, they've introduced the initiative, AP and shields for balance and the game isn't balanced all that well anyway. Summoners are massively overpowered. Even crap summons like those totems do extra damage and most importantly take half a turn to destroy which isn't being spent taking out a 'proper' enemy.
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He uses several french idioms and sings a Frere Jacque rather than Brother John. But it is somewhat downplayed, I imagine mostly because of Sir Patrick's lack of skill in French. I've literally never heard anyone sing anything other than the french version of Frére Jacques. It's easy to translate of course, but I'm 99% sure I learn the french rather than english words way back in primary school. I'd imagine that Patrick Stewart could wing french even if he isn't fluent, on the other hand if a scriptwriter cannot write french then there's nothing french in the script to wing. Plenty of actors 'speak' entirely foreign languages (albeit sometimes hilariously, if you know the language) by doing them phonetically.
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I used one source, provided by you as being the basis for the data in the chart and supporting it. Your other cites provided no useful information- unsurprisingly. It's OECD data you're arguing against, you're supporting Random Website. Normally that might be an appeal to authority, but Random Website is a worthless confused mess of conflicting and inconsistent data with no set method and which hasn't got any clue of such utterly basic things as which countries are in the EU and not- and cannot even manage to consistently apply their incorrect list. While the OECD is the fricking Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, one of the premier sources for data with rigorous established methods and a source list. To summarise: Your website has no clue who is in the EU and who isn't. Couldn't spare the 10s Google search? Didn't want to? Garbage either way. has shonky methodology apart from that no sovereignty attacks, yet includes ISIS includes deaths and injuries wholesale from attacks involving suicide bombings, thus they don't even apply their definition of 'mass shootings' properly doesn't know how to use confidence intervals conflicts with the reputable OECD data such that Europe's death go up, but US deaths somehow go down; oh so very conveniently provides no checkable, verifiable sources and that's off the top of my head. It's politically motivated guff for gullible morons who are incapable of checking facts for themselves and think just because Random Website says it it must be true.
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lol, I didn't cut anything off- I used your citation which was supposed to support your data. The 130 extra deaths, all of them, still don't get the death rate even above the US rate. Note also that on your cited website the US had two extra years and... minus 30 deaths with those 2 extra years compared to the OECD data. Either is wrong. But, in any case, direct from your cited website: "There were 55% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15". Really though, the person who made the chart doesn't even have a clue of such basic facts as who is in the EU. As I said, they've included Norway and Switzerland in the EU figure, the obvious hint being that the difference between their aggregate for Europe (343) and for the EU (297, sic*) is less than the 67 killed at Uttoya alone. The figure for the EU is actually 228. And as above, the US somehow has managed -30 deaths despite having two years longer, compared to the OECD data which is from a reputable source and follows proper methodology. *yeah, they've still got it wrong even when including Switzerland and Norway in the EU as they've also included one attack in Russia somehow. They're utter, irredeemable garbage. Incompetence or malfeasance, who knows, but it manages to have negative worth either way.
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Averaged EU rate = total number of deaths/ 100k population over the whole EU- that's method 2 in my example. Call it aggregate or EU wide rate if you prefer, makes no difference. It's still the only measurement that is relevant when you're talking about the EU as a whole. Let's go by the OECD numbers. As that's the only link that provides relevant data, and was indeed the source of the misleading chart with all the zero countries tripped from Last Time. Handily that means I can reuse the maths. US rate is 0.72; 227 deaths from ~320 million people European rate is ~0.33; total Euro population for provided countries is ~480 million, total deaths, 162. In order to get up to the claimed 55% more than the US you'd need (1) literally no more deaths in the US, and (2) an extra ~320 deaths in Europe, over the missing data period. That seems... unlikely. Indeed, it certainly didn't happen. EU rate? Without Uttoya the total deaths is 85, minus Switzerland and Iceland it's 79. And that removes about 14 million people only. I'll be generous and call the new rate 0.2 and, very generously, 1/3 of the US rate. So you'd need the small matter of 400 (!) extra deaths in the EU in 2 years to reach 1.55x the US rate. TLDR, your site is garbage and cannot into maths.
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That site is rubbish, so bad it's almost impossible to critique it effectively as you have to go back to 5th form maths to do so and write a text book. In this case it has nothing to do with anomalous data, since Breivik is excluded by simple dint of not being in an EU country. In this case he wouldn't make enough of a difference anyway. Problems are 10 fold difference in confidence interval renders it irrelevant as the 'true' figure is anything from 3x the US to 1/4 of it. Sample size is too small. They've screwed up the maths anyway, so it's doubly irrelevant. They also claim to exclude sovereignty based issues yet include ISIS attacks which are all about establishing the sovereignty of the Caliphate. About the least of their problems, to be fair. Their claimed rate is wrong whether just using the chart or not The averaged EU rate comes out about half that of the US, even when including the ISIS stuff, and is far lower when not. No sources provided for data used Data which is shown is inconsistent with conclusions and descriptions in text (EU only or Europe and EU? who knows, certainly not the author) To illustrate the mistake they've made (so far as I can tell, it's so bad it's impossible to be sure), the rate of a theoretical Norway/ Germany union is not the ~1 you get from adding 1.88 and 0.02 together and dividing by 2, because Germany has 15 times Norway's population; thus the combined rate is a bit less than 0.2 and not 1. So far as I can tell they've used the first method with a mix of EU and non EU countries- again it's impossible to tell since they don't provide what data they've actually used- but in any case they clearly haven't used the second method, for either EU countries or Europe as a whole, as they should have. Ironically, if you do method 1 for the EU you still end up with a lower rate than the US, you have to both use method 1 and include non EU Norway to get it above.
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Source, for those wondering. It's utter irredeemable garbage- you can get a good idea of why from that chart and without checking the website though. eg 55% more deaths in the EU per capita than the US from mass shootings is claimed. From that chart, 5 countries out of 28 EU ones have a higher rate than the US (NOR, SRB, FYROM, ALB, SWZ aren't in the EU) representing about 1/4 of the EU's population- and unsurprisingly countries with zero are left off the chart, again. Even just using the chart's data we can see the 55% claim is rubbish*, since the combined pops of ENGGERITY is far more than those 5 countries, and their rate is a quarter that of the US's which more than counters France having a high rate. Always depends on what you want to look at of course, but that site doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny and is pure PR/ fake news. It doesn't even consistently follow a skewed methodology, it's a Fox News 'opinion' piece. *while I won't check I'm fairly sure they've just added together all the rates- including Norway etc despite them not being EU- then divided by X countries to get the 55% claim. They should have added EU populations and incidences together to get the rate, not added the per capita rates directly- which gives a result significantly lower than the US's pre capita death rate, by a quick estimate about 50% less.
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Throwing out outliers usually only makes sense when you don't clamp the findings to just post 9/11 either. Islamic terrorism goes back at least to the early 80's. Even then outliers get amortized over such a long period that it's typically best to leave them in when discerning averages. Next, you don't just pull older numbers. After 2001 the next deadliest years of terror attacks is 2014, 2015, and 2016. Then when talking about the US alone, you don't just cite low numbers of attacks when more than anything our surveillance programs have been setup to mitigate attacks in the first place. Trouble is, if you decide to include 9/11 to be inclusive then where do you draw the line? It's definitely a massive outlier since not even a tenth of the number of deaths there have occurred due to islamic terrorism over the whole history of the US (might get close if you included Afghanistan and Iraq, but they probably shouldn't since the targets are military and terrorism technically still requires civilian targets). OK, so include 2001, and we'll take it back to 1776 as well because we want to be inclusive and include all context- and you end up with a similar number as if you exclude 9/11 and have stats done for a decade prior to 2014. Going back to 1776 is the only fully inclusive and fair methodology, after all, it just achieves the same result by adding in 200 odd 0 death years that would otherwise be arbitrarily excluded. Islamic terrorism is a lot older than the 1980s, it just didn't have the 'terrorism' moniker because that hadn't been invented yet. Same way as people wouldn't label the Crusades as genocide/ ethnic cleansing/ christian terrorism or 30 Years War as sustained Protestant/ Catholic 'ethnic' cleansing/ terrorism when both clearly were in the modern context. That's always been the case with statistics, hence the famous "lies, damn lies, and statistics" quote and various others. Indeed, you can get paid a great deal of money to produce statistics that help whichever argument your paymaster wants to make. But if you're honest about things then you have an exclude outliers that give wrong impressions; the expectation is not that 300 odd americans die per year in internal islamic terrorism and it isn't that Norway can expect a per capita >9/11 level event due to Nazis every decade just because of Breivik being recent.
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The 'Beefy' vs 'Seconds' options in the dlc preferences question does imply that difference since the two options are both for large expansions which take a lot of time but the 'Seconds' one is specifically for standalone type expansions. In context that presumably means an 'add on' MOTB type rather than an 'add in' type. Typically a roguelike would imply a randomised world (not necessarily fully randomised) and permanent death.
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Yes, but most honest people would include 9/11. Generally you exclude highly unusual events as being misleading, otherwise you end up with Norway being a Nazi deathtrap due to Breivik or 100% of international terrorism related deaths in New Zealand being due to the French equivalent of the CIA attacking Greenpeace. Doesn't have much to do with honesty anyway, last time people brought up statistics about terrorism we had a chart that excluded every developed country that had zero terrorist related deaths to try and prove how bad the problem was- unsurprisingly there were more with zero deaths than there were with deaths; and Norway was worst per capita due solely to Breivik.